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Saturday, August 12, 2017

El Chapo: Inside the Hunt for Mexico's most notorious drug king

Rush hour starts early
on Heroin Highway, generally by 6 a.m. Hockey dads in sport-utes; high school
teens in car pools; commodities brokers and pensioners making their
early-morning runs into Chicago on I-290. The Eisenhower Expressway – the Ike,
as locals call it – is a straight shot in from the western suburbs to the
mob-deep blocks of West Chicago. So Gangster Disciples and Vice Lords are up
with the sun to pitch their work to the early birds, hugging the corners under
the Ike's offramps to do much of their day's business by 8 a.m. Since cheap,
potent heroin flooded Chicago 10 years ago and addicted a bell-cow demographic
– middle-class whites – those corners off the Ike have become bull markets for
gangs strong enough to hold them down. "They serve you in your car,
quick-out in under a minute, and you're back home in Hinsdale before the kids
wake," says Jack Riley, the ex-special agent in charge of the Chicago
office of the Drug Enforcement Administration. "That's why gangsters kill
for those corners. They're the Park Place and Boardwalk of the drug game."

Riley, the town's most
famous federal agent since the days of the Untouchables, put together a strike
force that jailed the major kingpins and left the gangs rudderless and
scrambling. "We knocked down the big guys – the suppliers and OGs – but
the young ones started killing their way up. That's what happens when you get
your targets: The gangsters don't know who they work for." Actually, even
before his strike force rolled up the leaders, no one here knew who they really
worked for. Riley estimates that Mob City has 150,000 gangsters in residence –
and though most are in endless wars with one another, they've all blindly
served the same master for 10 years: Joaquín Guzmán Loera, better known as El
Chapo. The king of all kings has likely never set foot here, though he made
this city his American office, trucking heroin (and coke) from Mexico by the
metric ton and taking billions of dollars out in small bills. Chicago has been
a most congenial hub for Chapo. Centrally located and braided by interstates,
it is a day's drive, or less, from most of America – and from the Mexican border.

(In his Juarez cell jjust told he is going to the U.S.)

For 15 years, Chapo has
been Riley's white whale, the object of an obsession that teetered on
derangement and sidelined everything else, including his family. "I love
my wife and kid, but I was never home for dinner," says Riley, who fought
Chapo's proxies in five different cities while rising through the chain of
command at the DEA. Seven years ago, when he returned to Chicago for a third
(and final) tour of duty, his charge was to quash Chapo's deadliest gambit: a
species of heroin spiked with fentanyl that killed seasoned addicts by the
hundreds. Riley stormed in, knocked a bunch of heads together and brought
everyone – the DEA, FBI, state troopers and Chicago PD – under one roof to
chase the "choke-point guys": brokers who were buying in bulk from Chapo
and selling wholesale weight to the gangs.

By most measures,
Operation Strike Force was a smash success; arrests and seizures soared, the
local drug lords fell and the busts netted many millions in cash forfeitures,
enough to pay the salaries of strike-force adjuncts. But by the only metric
that mattered – the price of heroin on the street – Riley's mission was a wash.
"It was 50K a kilo when we started this, and 50K a kilo" three years
later, he says.

And so, in 2013, Riley
summoned his stagecraft and pronounced Chapo public-enemy number one. At a
press conference carried by hundreds of outlets, Riley and members of the
Chicago Crime Commission proclaimed Chapo the greatest threat since Al Capone,
a mass poisoner of the city and its suburbs. The fallout from Riley's broadside
surprised everyone, Riley included. "At most, I hoped they'd find some
corrupt colonel to go after him down there," says Riley. Instead, the
Mexican government was barraged with phone calls from infuriated business
leaders. "They screamed that Chapo was disgracing their country" and
demanded his arrest, says Riley. Authorities in Mexico changed their tack,
offering new levels of cooperation. That included a firm commitment to use
SEMAR, Mexico's tactical corps, to hunt down Chapo in the hills. Working hand
in glove, the DEA and SEMAR closed the net on Chapo. A year after Riley's
announcement, they chased him to Mazatlán and arrested him, without resistance,
in his hotel room. His escape from prison in 2015 merely prolonged the ending:
He was busted by SEMAR (using DEA leads) five months after he'd fled. Thus fell
the dragon: After a 30-year reign of murder and terror, Chapo was caught
fleeing a sewer tunnel in a shit-stained tank top and chinos.

Last spring, I flew out
to sit with Riley, who retired after Chapo's arrest. At 59, he'd moved with his
long-suffering wife, Monica, to a resort town whose name I can't divulge. (For
10 years, Chapo has had a price on Riley's head, a threat confirmed in recent
interviews with captured traffickers.) A ruddy, white-haired bruiser who holds
court from a bar stool, Riley seemed dispatched from the days of fedoras and
cops lighting Luckies at crime scenes. Born and raised in Chicago, he joined
the DEA out of college and moved his family 12 times as he climbed the ladder.
By the time he had quit last fall, he was the nation's number-two drug cop,
having been at or near the center of nearly every major mission to catch
foreign kingpins since the early Nineties. (It was his squad in Washington that
built the intel platform to bring down Pablo Escobar in Medellín, Colombia;
that helped catch the leaders of the Cali cartel and, later, the overlords in
the Mexican mobs.) Riley recites their names, but they mean nothing to him now.
Only Chapo endures, though he's being held at the Manhattan Correctional
Center, where he awaits his trial of the century in New York.

"Part of me
understands it – he's done, he'll die in jail," said Riley. "But the
other part says, 'No, he's still out there.' All those routes he opened, all
that fentanyl he shipped – he's gonna kill our kids for years to come. This
monster he built, this Sinaloa thing: It's too big to fail now, thanks to
him."

"Explain it to me," says one retired
DEA agent. "How did this fucking mope become El Chapo?"

In the months we
talked, either in person or on the phone, Riley spoke of Chapo in the present
tense, as though he were still at large at his mountain retreat, running the
world's largest supplier of illicit drugs from a town without power or
plumbing. Twice, Chapo had famously escaped maximum-security prisons, traveling
Mexico in bulletproof cars to dine and frolic with call girls in seaside towns.
Since 2001, when he launched a crusade to corner Mexico's $30-billion-a-year
drug trade, he'd been everywhere and nowhere, growing the parameters of his
empire and leaving defiled corpses as deed of ownership. He waged war by
atrocity in Juárez and Tijuana, bribed generals and governors to feed him
intelligence, and sent his lieutenants to the DEA, ratting on both his enemies
and his allies. "Other bosses you waited out 'cause they always make
mistakes," said Riley. "But this guy? Invisible. You couldn't find
him."

He grunted and drained
the last of his beer. We'd been at this bar for hours and hadn't looked at
menus; Riley flagged the bartender and ordered lunch. Since retiring, he had
spent his time knocking tee shots into tree lines and starting early on the
day's first cold one. Maybe it was just his nervous system resetting, but six
months after he left, he still mooned over Chapo, the enigma he never fully
worked out: "He's on top for 30 years, has billions of dollars hidden –
and he's a second-grade dropout who can barely read and write and has to
dictate love letters in prison. So explain it to me, 'cause I don't get it: How
did this fucking mope become El Chapo?"

If you wanted to create
a nursery for narco princelings, you'd probably build your greenhouse in the
mountains of Sinaloa, where the conditions for pathology are peak harvest. A
dirt-poor ribbon of rivers and farmland on the southwest shank of Mexico's coastline,
Sinaloa was largely ignored by the central government from the moment it became
a state, in 1830. Roads went unpaved, villages did without schools, and no
self-respecting official would visit the plazas of those remote, no-horse towns
in the Sierra Madre. And so the peasants, left to their own devices, developed
a shadow economy. In the 1920s and Thirties, they ran booze to Tijuana, where
Hollywood's darlings blew in for the weekend to flee the dry torpor of
Prohibition. Marijuana grew wild in the pastures; farmers trucked their bales
five hours down the road to market in Badiraguato. In time, some harvested the
poppy fields that Chinese tradesmen planted in the 1860s. Sons were taught by
fathers how to bleed the bulbs for their vile-smelling opium gum. You couldn't
make a killing, but you could make a sort of living if your kids didn't waste
their days learning how to read.

That was Chapo's
boyhood, and the boyhood, by degrees, of most of Mexico's drug lords of the
past half-century. He grew up with, or close to, kids who became his partners
and, eventually, his mortal foes: the Beltrán Leyva brothers, five cutthroat
charmers who would one day be his enforcers and political fixers; the
Arellano-Félix brothers, seven legendary sadists who roasted their victims
alive in vacant fields. Even Chapo's mentors were from Sinaloa, first-gen capos
like Don Neto and El Padrino, who turned a backwoods sideline into a
multinational machine that stretched from Cancún to San Diego. To this day,
Sinaloa's hills are to gangsters what western Pennsylvania is to frac pads and
NFL quarterbacks.

"He came of age in the Eighties, when
everyone got rich moving coke," explains one former Mexican operative.

Chapo was one of seven
kids born to Emilio, a rancher, and Maria, a devout Catholic, in La Tuna,
population 200. The family raised cows and grew sustenance crops behind a
two-room house with dirt floors. What money they laid their hands on was earned
uphill, where Emilio tended his poppies and marijuana. Once a month, he took
the yield to Badiraguato. There he'd be paid for his contraband, then drink and
whore all weekend and go home broke. A mean little man, he beat Chapo and his
brothers; Chapo fled, for good, in his early teens. He stayed at his grandma's,
grew his own weed and sent some of the proceeds home to feed his siblings.

Chapo (Spanish for
"Shorty") was a small, squat teen who burned to spit his nickname in
people's faces. He wore hats with tall crowns that lent him an inch or two,
rocked on his tiptoes when talking to friends and later, as a boss, only posed
for photos while standing on a custom-built stool. His will to power sprang
from being the picked-on runt despised and driven off by his father. That's not
junk science; it's the finding of the psychiatrist who assessed him as an adult
in prison. While jailed for eight years in the 1990s, Chapo sat for therapy
sessions. The psychiatrist filed a report on the man he treated. Chapo's
"tenacity" and "disproportionate ambition" were wound to a
sense of inferiority. To compensate, he craved "power, success and
[beautiful women]," orienting his "behavior toward their
obtention."

No farm was going to
hold a kid like that, and at 15 or 16 (early details are murky) he won an
introduction to the don of Badiraguato, Pedro Avilés Pérez. Avilés, the first
of the air smugglers in Mexico, hired him to do odd jobs for his lieutenants.
Chapo rode along on their runs to the U.S. border, soaking up knowledge of
roads and checkpoints and befriending dispatchers and truckers. Though he
couldn't read or write, he had a head for numbers and a steel-trap memory for
detail. Best of all, he didn't have an ounce of mercy in him. Ordered to kill a
man, he'd calmly walk up to him and put a bullet in his head.

Avilés' lieutenants
were a dream team of smugglers. After Avilés was killed in a shootout with
cops, they moved the operation to Guadalajara and named it the Federation.
Chapo learned logistics from Amado Carrillo Fuentes, an avid flier who bought a
fleet of planes and was nicknamed "Lord of the Skies." From Ismael
Zambada, the silent assassin called El Mayo, Chapo learned to leverage violence
just so, using only enough to send a message. And from Arturo Beltrán Leyva, he
learned bribes were the grease that kept the wheels of power turning. "He
was around smart guys and paid attention," says Alejandro Hope, a former
senior operative with CISEN, Mexico's version of the CIA. "And his timing
was perfect: He came of age in the Eighties, when everyone got rich moving
coke."

Chapo's first big break
was a quirk of history: the U.S. war on Colombia's cartels. In the 1970s, when
Escobar and his counterparts in the Cali mob swamped Miami with coke, they put
themselves in the crosshairs of the DEA. "They got rich, then they got
lazy – they talked on their phones, which was how we finally took them
down," says Riley. By the middle of the 1980s, U.S. Coast Guard cutters
had sealed off the cartels' sea lanes in the Caribbean. The Colombians had no
choice but to transship over land, sending their coke through Mexico to
America. This arrangement wasn't new – they'd used Mexicans for years and paid
them flat fees to serve as mules. But now all the leverage was with the
Federation, and Chapo was the first to see it. "He said, 'Screw you,
Pablo, I've got the smuggling routes. From now on, pay me in coke,' " says
Carl Pike, a former special agent in the Special Operations Division, an elite
unit created by the DEA that brings together the resources of a couple of dozen
agencies to attack the cartels from all sides. "The Colombians took
Chapo's terms because he was the best at what he did: getting their drugs off
the plane and up to L.A. in 48 hours or less."

"Chapo was creating a new kind of
cartel," says one expert.

Then a second piece of
luck fell into Chapo's lap. El Padrino, his cartel leader, ordered the
kidnapping and killing of a DEA agent named Kiki Camarena. It was a blunder
that brought the hammer of God down: a tenacious offensive by the Mexican army,
at the behest of the U.S. government. Padrino was arrested and sentenced to 40
years, handing off his kingdom to his capos. In 1989, Chapo's peer group
divvied up the country: Amado Carrillo Fuentes took the routes through Juárez;
the Arellano-Félixes got Tijuana and the coast, and Chapo took the run straight
north to Arizona, sharing Sonora with El Mayo and the Beltrán Leyvas. He had
recently turned 30 and was still wrapping his head around the burdens of
excessive wealth. But he was already investing in creative fronts: "He
bought a fleet of jets for 'executive travel,' and a grocery business to can
cases of peppers that actually contained cocaine," says professor Bruce
Bagley of the University of Miami, a cartel expert who's written six books on
the narco-economy. "He was so sure of his supply lines that he guaranteed
shipment. If any of his loads got seized by the cops, he paid the Colombians in
full."

While the other capos
got drunk on plunder, building villas with waterfalls and private zoos, Chapo
lived like a handyman, sequestering himself on a dusty ranch 20 miles clear of
Culiacán. (He was by then twice married, with at least seven kids; he'd go on
to have 11 more by five women.) But it was his vision that firmly set him
apart. "Chapo was creating the new cartel, a decentralized, hub-and-spoke
model," says Bagley. "He saw what was happening to the top-down
version: If you chopped the head of the snake off – Pablo being an example –
the rest of his operation fell apart." Chapo formed alliances with local
gangs and cut them in on his profits. He planted cells in new cities and left
his staff alone to run them, and happily shared power with his closest
partners, El Mayo and El Azul, a former cop. They were men like him: discreet
and coolheaded, occupied only by business. The other lords' loud lifestyles
were an affront to them. The only fit response was to take their routes from
them – and Chapo knew whose turf to grab first.

The other capos got drunk on plunder – Chapo
lived like a handyman on a dusty ranch.

There are roughly two
kinds of agents who go to work at the DEA. The Type A's – Jack Riley, for one –
are moral avengers who wage their war on drugs in a fissile rage. Then there's
the second type: the behind-the-scenes mechanic who patiently builds a case for
weeks or months, and goes home to his wife and kids at a decent hour.

Miguel Q. is a Type-B
plugger who chased Chapo almost as long as Riley did. (Still on the job, he
asked that I change his name; active agents risk their safety going public.)
He's done multiple missions, on war-zone footing, in cities south of the
border. He was on the scene for Chapo's arrest in 2014 – and his escape from
prison a year later. "Most ridiculous engineering I ever saw," he
says of the trench dug under Chapo's cell from a half-built house a mile away.
"I mean, a dead-plumb line" from end to end, and "a hole just
big enough for him to ride that cycle" and be out and on a plane back to
the hills. "Who even thinks that, let alone does it?"

Well, Miguel, for one:
He'd seen it up close as a young agent in the early Nineties. At the time, he
was focused on truckloads of coke coming through major checkpoints out west.
"It was Arellano-Félix dope, or so we thought," Miguel says – the
cartel owned these particular checkpoints. Then his team started hearing
chatter about a tunnel underneath the fence. A tip led them to a warehouse on
the Mexican side, where miners were digging a quarter-mile tube, with rail cars,
strong rooms and ventilation piping. It was a stroke of audacity and technical
smarts far beyond the prowess of the Arellano-Félix Organization, who were
brutal cocaine cowboys with a penchant for boiling rivals in acid and pouring
their remains down a drain. "We're like, 'Who is this guy, and how many
tunnels has he got?' " says Miguel. Hundreds more have been discovered in
the decades since.

What vexed Miguel
wasn't that he knew so little of Chapo; it was that no one in Mexico seemed to

While incarcerated

know him either. Since co-founding the Sinaloa cartel in 1989, Chapo had run
it, yet there wasn't a single recent photo of him on file. It wasn't till his
arrest, in June 1993, that the public got a glimpse of him. He'd been caught in
Guatemala after fleeing the country in connection with a gunfight at an
airport. The shootout had left several bystanders dead, including Juan Jesús
Posadas, the cardinal of Guadalajara. Posadas' murder was an inflection point:
the day that Mexico was forced to come to terms with the narco-state growing
under its feet.

Chapo was convicted in
a closed-door trial and given 20 years, hard time, for narco-trafficking. He
treated this as a senseless inconvenience. At Puente Grande, a supermax
facility 50 miles west of Guadalajara, he bought off everyone from wardens to
washerwomen and settled down to do his business. He received his lieutenants in
a sumptuous parlor and sent them away with detailed orders on where to ship his
tonnage. He brainstormed markets with his older brothers, whom he'd deputized
to manage his affairs. They were easy enough to reach; he had cellphones
smuggled in. He was partial to BlackBerry, a Canadian company whose hardware
was hellish to crack, says Pike.

But Chapo wasn't all
work. He paid guards to round up hookers in town for orgies he threw in the
mess hall. He kept up his spirits with fiestas and concerts: Chapo loved to
dance with pretty chicas. The first feminist drug lord, he ordered the prison's
integration with a select group of female convicts; one of them, Zulema
Hernández, became his muse and in-house lover. He sent her schoolboy mash notes
in hothouse prose that he dictated to his steno, a fellow convict. All the
while, he juggled conjugal visits from his girlfriends, wife and ex-wife. The
wear and tear of a multivalent love life took its toll on Chapo. Cocaine had
previously been his drug of choice, but in jail he renounced it for Viagra. His
people brought it in big batches, along with steak, lobster, booze and tacos –
Chapo's weakness, besides women, was food. Eventually, the overindulgence
levied its toll: At the time of his rearrest, in 2014, he'd been scheduled to
meet with a specialist – "the penis-pump doctor to the stars," says
Riley. "The vitamin V didn't cut it anymore."

"We knew he was moving tons while he was
still in jail, " says one agent. "Turned out he had hired the warden"

In the end, though, he
mostly used his time in jail to learn from the errors of other bosses.
"Rule one: Don't talk on phones or send texts," says Miguel, who
walks me through Chapo's communications methods. A densely complex system of
encrypted squibs and Wi-Fi pings between lieutenants, it was built around a
network of offshore servers that bounced the posts off mirrors in other
countries. "We found 60 iPhones and hundreds of SIM cards when we raided his
house in Guadalajara – and still we couldn't track where his calls came
from," says Miguel. Chapo hired experts to constantly revise his tactics,
and always made sure to toss his phones after a couple of days of use. He was
an early adopter of social media, deploying hackers to mask his instructions to
staffers on Snapchat and Insta-gram. "After years of trying to track him,
we moved on in 2012 and got up on his tier-two guys – the bodyguards and
cooks," says Miguel. Still, it took two years to divine his "pattern
of life" – the small corps of people who served Chapo closely and could
point to his general location.

A Chapo drug tunnel

Rule number two: Be a
nimble supplier. He fitted tractor-trailers with elaborate traps – fake walls
and subfloors that hid hundreds of kilos of product (and millions in
shrink-wrapped cash on the trip back). He bought jumbo jets and filled them
with "humanitarian" goods for drops in Latin America, then flew the
planes back, bearing tons of cocaine, to bribed baggage handlers in Guadalajara.
There were fishing vessels and go-fast boats and small submarines that could
lurk underwater till the Coast Guard passed above. "We knew he was moving
tons while he was still in jail, but we didn't find out how till later
on," says Miguel. "Turned out he had literally hired the warden"
to work as his logistics guy. That warden, Dámaso López, would vanish from
sight shortly before Chapo escaped. Over the next 15 years, López rose through
the cartel ranks, overseeing much of the daily churn while el jefe traveled the
country dodging cops. Though Chapo trusted no one but family members and the
men he came up with in Sinaloa, he made two exceptions to that rule. The first
one was for López; the second, a pair of brothers who became his distributors
in the States. In both cases, he'd have cause to deeply regret it.

Given his honeycomb of
routes and the tonnage he pushed through, there wasn't much point in warring
for turf. But something happened to Chapo during those eight years in prison,
some fundamental shift in his sense of self. Once happy being the wizard behind
the curtain, he now seemed intent on announcing to the world who the real boss
had been all along. "He broke out of Puente Grande with an S on his chest,
thinking, 'I'm the baddest motherfucker on the planet,' " says Dave
Lorino, a retired DEA cop who helped mastermind the case against Chapo in
Chicago. "He'd learned he could buy anyone, get out of any jail – and
there was nothing that us gringos could do about it." "Prison made
him hard, at least in his own mind, and all the other bosses were soft,"
says Riley. "He thought, 'Why should I settle for a chunk of the pie when
I can have the whole thing?' "

After escaping Puente
Grande in 2001, either crouched in a laundry cart or strolling out the door –
"official" versions vary; none are confirmed – Chapo lost no time
planting his flag. He paid Tejano pop bands to spread the news, crafting
narcocorrida ditties that sang his praises and warned rival capos to leave
town. Stories began running in the Mexican papers about Chapo's generosity to
the poor. "He was building roads here and sewage plants there and schools
in the pueblos and all that crap," says Riley. "But the hell of it
is, we never found those schools – and if he ever built a road, it was for his
trucks." The thesis of these ploys was always the same: Chapo was the
great exception. He was the honorable capo who would swell peasants' hearts
with his derring-do defiance of los Yanquis. "Please," says Riley.
"This is a guy who chops heads off and leaves 'em in coolers."

In 2002, Chapo launched
a war on the Gulf Cartel; he sent his death squad, Los Negros, into Nuevo
Laredo to bang it out in the streets. The Gulf returned fire with its own band
of crazies, a U.S.-trained group of army deserters who called themselves the
Zetas. The Zetas were (and are) a special slice of hell, terrorists who happen
to deal drugs for a living and are as happy killing citizens as narcos. To
defeat them, Chapo upped his cruelty quotient. His assassins stormed a
nightclub and rolled severed heads across the dance floor. Body parts were
stuffed in the mouths of dead Zetas as dumb-show warnings to his foes: "A
hand in the mouth meant you'd stolen from him; a foot meant you'd jumped to the
other team," says Riley.

By 2006, Chapo's
violence was general in Mexico. He pushed his fight with the Zetas into Juárez,
where the gutters ran red for years. Tens of thousands of people were
slaughtered in Murder City, as Juárez came to be known. Riley was the agent in
charge of El Paso, Texas, when the worst of the carnage erupted. "We'd
intercept calls from the other side of the fence" – Chapo's hit squads
checking in with their bosses. "They'd say, 'We took care of that thing on
Calle so-and-so; what else you got for us tonight?' "

Being two miles from
bedlam – with no jurisdiction – drove Riley to desperate measures. He broke
with protocol and phoned the local papers, calling Chapo a "coward"
and a "butcher." Chapo took the bait: He put a hit out on Riley. One
night, Riley was at a gas station refueling when two men in a pickup pulled in.
They got out of the truck and came at him in the dark. He drew his pistol
first. They turned and fled. "Maybe that was a warning: 'Back off and shut
up,' " he says. "I hope he knew better than to have me whacked. He'd seen
what happens when you shoot DEA."

History bears this out:
Chapo has never killed a fed or declared war on the U.S. government. But it's
clear now that he entertained the option. According to multiple witnesses
who'll testify at trial, Chapo went looking for heavy ordnance in 2008 to
attack the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City. He was furious at extraditions of
cartel leaders, who were getting long sentences in U.S. courts and dispatched
to spend their days in federal pens. Many of them were sent to Supermax, a
facility in Colorado where inmates live in near-total isolation. It was one
thing to do time at Puente Grande, where a man of Chapo's means could live like
a pimp while waiting for his crew to dig him out. It was another to go to
Supermax, where anyone wishing to pay him a call would be subject to extreme
vetting by U.S. Marshals.

Still, that Chapo would
consider buying a bomb suggests that he'd lost his bearings. In 2007, Miguel
was stationed in Guadalajara when he got a hot tip from Chapo's camp. A ship
from Colombia was bound for Manzanillo with an enormous cache of coke onboard.
Of even greater interest was the name of the cocaine's owner: Arturo Beltrán
Leyva, or ABL. Chapo and ABL had been like brothers since their teens in
Badiraguato. They'd made each other rich with their complementary gifts: Chapo
the genius at blazing new routes – ABL the master of pervasive bribes. To be
sure, there'd been tensions building between them – but what made Sinaloa the
world's biggest drug gang was its settling of internal disputes. Its bosses had
stuck together while Chapo was away, then welcomed him back, without a squawk,
when he returned to his seat of power in 2001.

"For Chapo to
reach out about ABL's dope – yeah, I was shocked," says Miguel. "All
those years together and all the money they made? Chapo was basically saying,
'No more friends.' " One morning in the fall of 2007, Miguel and 120 heavily
armed troops descended on the freighter. Unsealing the shipping pods, they
found double what was promised, almost 25 tons of cocaine. Gathered end to end,
it ran four basketball courts in length. Street value: $2 billion. "When
we loaded it out to burn on the Army base, it was the biggest fire you ever
saw," says Miguel. "And I had to stick around for every minute, make
sure no kilos went out the door." With the exception of El Mayo, Chapo had
burned all his bridges; he was now, like Macbeth, so steeped in blood that
there was no going back, only forward.

Somewhere in America,
in the witness-security wing of an undisclosed federal prison, sit the two men
whose testimony will seal Chapo's fate. Margarito and Pedro Flores, identical
twins in their thirties, are two of the least fearsome thugs on the planet,
nerds who somehow noodled their way to the center of Chapo's circle.
"They're, like, five-foot-five and a buck-40," says Lorino, who spent
months debriefing them when they surrendered, in 2008. "I laugh when I read
that they're Latin Kings. Real Kings would eat 'em for lunch and still be
hungry."

In 2005, while
launching his quest to monopolize Mexico's drug trade, Chapo was told about a
pair of Chicago natives with the best broker network in the country. For years,
the Flores brothers had been buying in bulk from one of Chapo's lieutenants
near the border. They were smart and street-avoidant, faithfully paid on time
and looked like they worked at a Wendy's in La Villita, the barrio on Chicago's
West Side. Chapo was intrigued. Set a meeting, he told his guy. The twins were
brought to Mexico for the rarest of honors: a face-to-face with Chapo at his
compound.

Chapo was impressed
when he sat with them: They were all about business, not bravado. He and his
principal partners, El Mayo and ABL, came to an agreement on a deal. They would
front as much dope as the twins could handle and give them a break on the
price. They would also allow them to buy on terms instead of cash on delivery
for each load. For the twins, it was like cashing a Powerball ticket. In the
summer of 2005, they swamped Chicago with Chapo's H. Almost immediately, the
city's hospitals were packed with ODs: Newbies and junkies abruptly stopped
breathing after snorting or spiking the product. The Chicago DEA went to
wartime footing, scrambling to interdict the lethal batch that would kill a
thousand people in less than a year. Agents traced the dope to a lab near
Mexico City. "Chapo had brought in chemists to make it
extra-super-duper," says Riley. How? By adding fentanyl, a synthetic
narcotic that looks (and cooks) like heroin. "It's 30 to 50 times stronger
than heroin, and you can't tell which from which when you cut 'em up." In
May 2006, authorities raided the lab and arrested five employees. One of them
had been busted in California for manufacturing fentanyl.

But Chapo shrugged off
the takedown. He had a vise grip on Chicago – and Milwaukee, Detroit,
Cincinnati, Columbus, Ohio, and cities farther east that the twins supplied.
From 2005 to 2008, they moved $2 billion of Sinaloa's product. The arrangement
worked smashingly for the cartel. It was supplying half the coke and heroin in
America, according to reports by the Justice Department. It had partners in
West Coast cities, was moving heavily into Europe and planting new cells in
South America. With cash pouring in from every port, it was paying hundreds of
millions a year in bribes to Mexican officials, and getting white-glove service
in return. Attempts by the DEA to catch Chapo and his partners were subverted
time and again by intel leaks. "Outside of SEMAR, there was no one we
could trust," says a frustrated DEA hand. "We'd feed them information
and our informant would turn up dead." Often, Chapo would saunter away
minutes before a raid, as if to thumb his nose at the pinche gringos.

He'd become, in short,
the man he dreamed up as a pudgy teen in La Tuna. No one could touch him, and
everyone feared him. He even had the requisite beauty-queen wife: In the summer
of 2007, he married Emma Coronel, Miss Coffee and Guava. Their wedding was
virtually an affair of state. Drug lords and ladies flocked to the event,
dancing to Tejano combos playing songs of praise for the groom. For added
amusement, the Mexican army swooped down to finally corner Chapo. This time, he
didn't even make it exciting. He skipped out a full day early, having fed the
generals a phony wedding date.

The twins who betrayed Chapo

In
May 2008, Chapo called the Flores twins to a summit at his
compound in La Tuna. Pedro couldn't make it, but Margarito went, taking the
five-hour car ride up the mountain. He'd done this once before, but something
was different this time: As he glanced out the window, he saw bodies chained to
trees, their flesh being eaten by coyotes. He'd been in the game long enough to
know what that meant – there was a tree along that road reserved for him.

At the meeting in La
Tuna, Flores was given an ultimatum: Stop buying ABL's dope now, or else.
"Chapo told him to pick a team – and he only warned people once,"
says Lorino, the retired DEA agent. "He liked the twins personally –
they'd made him a lot of money," but he was prepared to kill them and
forfeit billions to settle his accounts with the Beltrán Leyvas. This put the
Flores twins in a desperate fix: Soon after, ABL called and told them not to
buy from Chapo. Caught between two killers, the twins weighed out the options,
then phoned their lawyer in Chicago. Reach out to the DEA, they told him –
"We'll give them Chapo and ABL if they protect us."...........

@11:39 when you are a loser and have nothing but a life of poverty to look forward to... you get tired of losing and risk it all for a moment of glory even if it means that your mind will be violently separated from your body.. I came from nothing and I went to school and worked hard for everything that I now rightfully own (I do very very well for my self) and to this day I do not judge nor condemn those that join cartels back home where I'm originally from .. it's simply a way of life in some regions of Mexico .. so before you make comments about calling ppl losers and talking shit about corridos.. stop and look at yourself and ask yourself what you would have done if you grew up in la sierra pendejo

10:52 Your chain of thought is illogical, it's contradictory. Also, you allude to moral relativism by saying it's a way of life. So that makes it ok even if it negatively effects others living thousands og miles away?

The people that spend money on corridos are mostly humble workers, not the drug traffickers, which many of them become waltz dancing aristocrats like their master puppeteers.the people make or break the corridos and no pompous ass full of pompas will ever separate us from our most beloved corridos.You the purebreds, racists and nationalists can keep your Wagnerian Operas for the aryans and shove them up the Ring of the Niebelungs"

@5:30 I could care less if I allude to a moral relativism... I'm not discussing morals, I'm stating a reality that everyone here seems to ignore .. some of the ppl that I know are in the business have a genuine desire and drive to help out the community that surrounds them at a greater magnitude than even your most liberal politicians would.. yes they hurt ppl down the road and thousands of miles north and south .. but so do I every Valentine's Day when I find myself at a name brand jewelry store buying my wife the next piece of jewelry with x amount of diamond carats

11:12 never mind who the mexicans, poorly edicated, cartels, drug trafficmers, single mothers spinster sisters and their cats "blame"...There are thousands and thousands of reports by real brainy american investigators, some of them past and present US government employees, some leaked, others released by the US government that accuse and blamerican past and present US governments for many of the worst situations in all the trouble spots in the whole world, many of them even have PhDs in their field of work, how about you find some and stop facking around here where your shit will never fly??

Definitely some incorrect information and embellishments. The overall story arc is correct. But some of the details were out of order and mixed up. For example when Chapo was in Puente Grande he wasn’t running things using a bunch of Blackberry smartphones because Blackberry didn’t release a consumer smartphone until 2001 the year he walked out of Puente Grande. So he wasn’t running things in the 90’s using a Blackberry. He did use them in the mid-00’s onwards though. LOTS of little things like that in this article that the author didn’t bother correcting or just didn’t care that things were out of order or embellished.

another was Viagra. Hernandez started that story. V was approved for use in March 1999, and on the market months later, then Brazil and Mexico approved for its market. lets say Jan 2000, his escape Jan 2001. so if he used it during that time and he was the very first person to obtain it then his use was only a year or so. sure it could be....but...

The US encouraged Sinaloan farmers to grow opium poppies during WW2. They needed it for the massive amount of wounded during the war. A freind of mine from one of the villages there told me that there were older people in his village who would tell stories how the US sent representatives back then to encourage opium production, and to buy it. Rolling Stone should do better homework and not soley blame the Chinese/Sinaloense people because for awhile at least, the USA wanted them to grow poppy.

It is the Chinese fault,they are the ones that brought it from San Francisco. They dealt with the Chicago mob in the 1920's. During WWII the U.S did encourage farmers in those regions to grow Opium to make Morphine NOT Heroine. When the wa r ended it was illegal to grow. Most farmers stop and the greedy ones didn't......

Agreed that there is def some mistakes in this article. Does anyone know if this article was written by the same guy who wrote the Mencho article?? I'll have to look it up, but good to see articles like this in any US publication..

Riley is #2 on my most hated DEA personnel list. I'm really surprised Mike Vigil didn't figure out a way to get his irrelevant ass into this article. I'd like to know Riley's real opinion behind closed doors. You dedicated what 30 (?) years of your life to the DEA. Theres more drugs on the street now, and stronger ones, then ever before. How does that feel to do your job and fail miserably??? I wonder what he thinks they accomplished.

It's also funny that they mention they need Chapos help finding all his hidden billions..If the DEA was really about what they say they are, that money wouldn't matter. They would just burn it. It's dirty money and has blood on it. Obviously, that'll never happen because most people know the DEA/gov is full of shit-and when its all over, they'll have Chapos money while he rots away at ADX. Exactly what they wanted..

@5:37 I really appreciate your comment And agree 100% All that hard work for Mr.Riley and not a single decrease in addition and availability of Dope on the streets. All those years away from your wife and children, and he will still have to worry about his kids and grandkids becoming addicts themselves! You arrested Chapo great job! Congrats!! But the drug problem is definitely WORSE than ever before.

His father knew it was fake news when they claimed alfredito went into badiraguato, this is not his life. He's taking over the music side, one of his artists is Adrian Favela. Guia la familia y hazlo bien, no seas como yo; the words of a real father. You can see him in a red/black corvette stingray in DF.

La Isla Chingada no tiene nada, nomás pura agua salada en PR.La RD had too many Haitians, they sent many of them back to Haiti to work on the american magiladoras for 20 cents a day, now the Dominicanuses have to wash their own calzones en el Rio and grow their own grifa.Cubans at it again?Maybe but not officially, after fidel and raul had to send Cuban Air Force General Arnaldo Ochoa to the firing squad to save the "revolution"...The cuban government has been collaborating with american mobsters since they planted El Che Guevara in Bolivia for his assassination by the CIA CONTRACT MURDERER FELIX ISMAEL RODRIGUEZ.

No but they were involved.It was LFM, who at the time had an alliance with CDG. CDG sent Zetas to help train the LFM enforcers. LFM during the time working with Zs tossed the decap heads onto the dance floor of the Sol y Sombra in Uruapan, Michoacan. ABout 10 years ago or so.

If I'm not mistaken the heads were rolled onto a dance floor by LFM and were supposedly the heads of dead Zetas. Yes the LFM were trained by Z's but that was before they broke apart, and LFM announced their independence with that act on the dance floor.

Yes chivis some pregnant girl had her head taken off and that was the payback but the story was the men were z's and after that the z's were kicked out by LFM. They were trained by the z's but turned on them. If they weren't zetas then the news was spread that they were in order to say they were cleansing the state of hitmen and secuestradores

OK armchair cartel strategists - If you were a Flores bro, and Chapo tells you don't buy from ABL or I'll chain you to a tree and leave you to the coyotes and ABL tells you don't buy from Chapo or I'll chainsaw you and send the parts to your family, what would you do?

Is the part about Chapo snitching about ABL's $2 billion coke shipment the real reason for the Guzman/BL falling out true? The usual story says that Chapo snitched on Mochomo BL resulting in his bust and that was the reason for the execution of Chapo's kid Edgar on the parking lot of a Culichis shopping mall and the CDS/BLO split.

They left out the best part about how Sean Penn farted during his moment of truth as a big-time Rolling Stone investigative journalist doing undercover reporting LOLOLOLOLOLOL. Truly Rolling Stone's finest hour LOL. Hunter S Thompson must be rolling over in his grave and doing a bunch more bumps of Colombian blow untouched by Mexican hands while he watches Jannie boy suffer from that frat-house lawsuit.

If you were El Chapo would you put on contracts on Penn and that Mexican actress who looks like a man, what's her name, you know, the one who's NOT A DRUG LORD BUT PLAYS ONE ON TV!!!?

Allow me to take the first bite...Putting aside the obvious...of not getting involved in the first place.

I would squeal loud like the guy in the movie Deliverance. Or like the Flores twins.

That part I am cool with. BUT when the feds went to the twins because they wanted to hang Mochomo as the biggest narco monster ever, and the Flores twins never mentioned Mochomo as interacting with them before...yet named 50 others.... well that is BS. and it makes me wonder how much of their "golden testimony" was BS against others.

As for why the split. it was Mochomo that made it irreversible. But there were huge tensions prior and already split. in fact agreed to split. So to chapo being the sociopath that he is, Mochomo no longer had value or deserving of loyalty, and he wanted his kid out of altiplano, he had been there 3 years. so he offered the feds Mochomo on a platter.

I think Chivis knows even more than she let's us know...you are a bulldog, I respect your opinions, and see much more cred from you and Otis...I also like the way you guys do t let us commentors get out of life e , yet still voice our opinions (fantasies for a few on here). Thanks to all of you at BB.

Whenever there are big loses of money or products, it is usually government officers stealing from their associated narcos that trusted they could put a big load like that together for "some reason"Mochomo himself said he did not blame la Chapa, but el.Barbas was too far gone to understand, and played the chilangos hand for them like a suckered sucker.shut up and get the lie detectors. See tha losers in prison and the winners buying billion dollar shares and becoming "vicepresident of Dow Jones or Citi bank or prezident or Russia Novotnyak supported by Deutsche bank of Russia in Cyprus...and the US.

That one shipment of ABL was worth 2 billion ? Wow i wonder how rich that guy was? if he also paid $450,000 to each top SIEDO officials that worked for him and his brother alfredo was willing to pay 3 million a month to a general which they would split a million each 1 million alfredo,1 million Mayo, 1 million Chapo but at the end they didnt have to because Arturo had the generals boss in his payroll already , I think ABL was easily a billionaire as well

1:43 where are "alfredo's millions?He was a puppet, when he go murdered all his property got confiscated by his own company partners in televisa and the government, he shared with epn and genaro garcia luna his hangars in estado de mexico. EPN soon needed a whole new airport to move his shit around, he stole the lands of farmers in Atenco and ordered them murdered kidnapped, tortured and raped, BY EPN'S EDOMEX POLICE...CISEN is corrupt since it was founded as DFS to please their CIA masters, Alejandro Hope could do better.and Rollin stone too.

Who are more elite / better trained GAFES or SEMAR ?SEMAR goes on the most dangerous missions but GAFES are supposed to be special forces of Mexican military?What makes SEMAR uncorruptable compared to the rest of Mexico military?

GAFES go to the mountain to kill "insurgent indians" that want to be left alone but do not ask for anything from the government at any level, education, health care, jobs, foods, or to be left alone, all paid for by the US government.--The marinas are just higher pretending mass murderers at the service of the mass murdering government of epn and the US.

Well Arturo Beltran Leyva has many nicknames which el fatasma happens to be one of them. To be moving 25 tons in on vessel is pretty fkn impressive, Amado status!.i am curious as to why there is no story of the plazas he ran who he rubbed out to get where he was at the height of his prime. Chapo was envious of how big he was cause he wanted to be in those botas blancas.

11:22 Mochomo wasnt head of security for Chapo he was in charge of protecting the CDS leaders family members thats why he had two hit squads under his command / also in charge of logistics . el fantasma and bravo were in charge of chapos security later cholo ivan

El barbas was with cdj until amao's death, the business was mainly imports, La chapa was mainly about exports, but both had ample experience in both operations, except amado's airplanes were not his, like el barbas' they were all owned, and do you n ow who was the operator of mexico's aviation civil or civilian aeronautics? DFS COMMANDER JULIÁN SLIM HELÚ older brother of carlos slim helú, the world's richest man.Coincidentally, Pablo Escobar Gaviria's "el varito" was in chsrge of colombia's Civil Aeronautics too, not that they have anything to do with drug trafficking necessarily...

This is true, ABL goes by so many names that most of his corridos never mentioned his name only his rancho and his apodos. El Pacas De A Kilo, El Jefe De Jefes, Arturo El De CLN, El Ayudante, El Niño Sabio, El Travieso De La Palma, El Santo De La Palma, El Potro De La Palma, El Tío, El Licenciado, El Mayor De Los Caballeros and Finally El Botas Blancas. You never heard much about him till they arrested Mochomo, to me that was discrete as they come. Tbh we need more on this mythical figure to how he became one of amados pistoleros and how he got to be as big as he was. There was only one picture of this man that floated around, the one where he's smiling. Crazy to think that behind that smile was one of the most ruthless drug lords the world has ever seen.

@ 4:09 Because he didn't snitch in the conventional sense. He used the cops to go after his enemies not to get time off his sentence. Everyone knows the Mexican government works with CDS more than any cartel. It's more a relationship than 'snitching'

Don't listen to some of the posters here who keep acting like he is a snitch like the Flores brothers.. I don't like the guy either. He was a piece of s*** and this article left out a lot of the brutal things he did but he wouldn't have made it as far as he did if he was a rat.

@ 4:09 I'd also like to say El Chapo, as bad as he is and he is really bad, is not the worst of ppl. There are other cartels/cartel leaders worse than Chapo's CDS which is why CDS gets a lot of support from the government and ppl alike.

This isn't a post praising CDS but more so just showing how bad the cartels in Mexico are, CDS included.

Isidro ain't even blo anymore Damask was when Maza then chapitos took it from Damaso you think chapo was hiding in los mochis because Cholo took it from blo you blo are living in the past even los Hs left blo

The part in the article that implies Ivan was Chapos head of security..made me think that contrary to what everyone says about them they've probably played an very important role in the Sinaloa cartel even before chapo got arrested..who knows might even turn out they were the ones with more operational control in terms of the day to day running of things way before Chapo got arrested again..with their Pops acting as a consigliere of some sort obviously.....Chapo+Mayo=Gambino+Luchesse...

Of course the sons were deeply involved..all these guys talk shit about no experience punks...far from true..punks, maybe..but all the Jr's are very game savvy. But, like all young men, especially ones with $$$ and power, get the "God" complex, and fuck up..they had their fuck ups, and almost died twice..they are in check now...there's a clash of the Titans war coming..CDS is restocked, and streamlined, and gearing up..CJNG is coming hard, and fast, it will come down to who is more spread out, and fighting the most fronts will lose. I don't think either will try and fight this on their own turfs..this will be done on the plazas...poor civilians...it's gonna be bad...eventually Trump will find a way to get boots on ground in Mexico..so whoever pays up the most won't be slaughtered, but allowed to surrender... US troops will terminate them in days...then both govs will become officially the Cartels...just watch and see...Trump wants that money..he's looking for an excuse to do it..he's already threatened to..so if too much more shit hits the fan, and spills any more to US...he will invoke some gov bs act and go get his new cash cow...makes big business sense....and we all know what motivates The Trump ( chump)

Because Barbie was talking to the DEA negotiating since about 2005 or 2006, already trying to get a good deal, at least that's what the word is. It's also rumored he helped turn in Botas blancas to get favor and if you look at the way things are now I think it's true

I would rather trust Zambadas' court hearing than this crap from Rolling stone, seems they wanted to hide the real problem : https://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/north-america/item/17396-u-s-government-and-top-mexican-drug-cartel-exposed-as-partners